Sacrifices (23 page)

The men charged.

Genevieve wanted no part of this, wanted to get far away—the priest was beyond help if he was here, and surely they'd find another way to help Anna even if he was. Surely. It was time to get the hell out of here, and she would, just as soon as she could banish the memory of Belial's room in the prison, of ditching Anna in a dungeon with a ravening monster on the loose.
I gotta go. I can't ditch her again. I gotta go.

She got to her knees but couldn't seem to make herself get up and run. Instead, she watched the horrible, inevitable collision.

Stash was fearless. He leaped to the hood of the Locos' car with bullets flying, with two of his men down with holes in them, a scream on his lips, fire blazing from his
hand. One of the men—kids—whatever—behind the car stood, gun leveled at Stash, and Genevieve winced.

She couldn't tell what happened. The gun misfired, or it was out of bullets, or maybe the kid holding it just choked, but the kid held it not six feet from Stash in the heat of battle and nothing happened.

Luck.

Stash unleashed hell on the poor, stupid kid. The first bullet snapped the kid's head back. Genevieve couldn't tell where the second hit, and she was grateful when the kid's body fell behind the car and she couldn't see what happened as Stash and his men pumped bullets into the corpse.

She really was going to throw up.

One of the Locos was getting away, had legged it even as Stash charged, and now the other bangers let out a war whoop, leaped the corpses of their enemy, and started after him.

There was motion where Genevieve hadn't expected it, and her mouth dropped open in shock as she saw the unthinkable: the kid, the one Stash had blasted in the face, the one who had been shot maybe a dozen times at zero range, stood up. Another of the dead men behind the car stood with him, then the third. Their faces were dirty but unbloodied, stilled with a cold, ready rage.

She screamed something. A warning, probably, but even she wasn't sure. It didn't matter anyway, not over the noise.

The three men cut into Stash's running platoon from behind. This time, the kid's gun didn't misfire. Two men dropped, a third, a fourth.

Stash and the other two survivors spun around. Even from here, Genevieve could see their eyes widen with horror.

They ran. The kids ran after them.

Numb from the sensory and emotional overload of everything she had witnessed, Genevieve backed away.

The screen door
banged off the house as a couple of young bangers rushed into Moreno's house.

“We smoked 'em!” one of the kids shouted before faltering in the doorway.

Moreno was on the couch, semiconscious, a blanket wrapped around his body. His eyelids fluttered, and a black bruise centered over his left eye had spread over a third of his forehead. He shivered violently as the priest wiped his brow with a wet cloth.

Anna stood by his feet, biting her nails and wishing for a cigarette. The priest had stopped his ritual when Moreno went into convulsions, bloody foam erupting from his mouth. The shaking had stopped immediately. Anna and the priest had then helped Moreno to the couch—the priest taking a moment to throw the rug back over the circle—and covered him. The shooting ceased not long after. Now Anna desperately wanted to get out of here, but she also desperately wanted answers. She thought she was beginning to understand some things, but she needed to be sure.

“Oh,
shit
,” the kid said. “What happened? Is he okay?”

“He'll be fine,” the priest said, though Anna thought she read less certainty in his eyes than his words. “The fighting is over?”

“Yeah! It was
awesome.
Ziggy got shot in the fuckin'
head
, man, and he just got up and
threw down.
I never seen nothin' like it.”

“Is anyone hurt?”

The kid froze. “I . . . I don't know. I came straight here.”

“Go. Tend to your wounded and your dead, if any.” The priest gave him a kindly smile. “We'll still be here when you finish. Rogelio will want to speak with you.”

The kid's brow furrowed with worry as he looked at the man on the couch.

“Go,” the priest said again. “There's nothing you can do here.”

After a lingering look at Moreno, the kid ducked out, taking the other one with him.

“We need to get him to a hospital,” Anna said.

“No. He belongs here,” the priest said, sudden steel in his voice. “I mean,” he added in a softer tone, “if we stray from here, they will kill him. The others.”

“Then we should call a doctor,” Anna said.

“They don't make house calls these days,” the priest said. “Rogelio will pull through. He just needs to rest.” This time the uncertainty in his eyes made Anna wonder if he was reassuring himself.

“Give me a break.” She got out her phone and dialed a number from memory. It started ringing.

“What are you doing?” the priest asked.

“Calling a doctor. I know people, okay? Guy's an unemployable drunk, but he knows his shit.”

The priest nodded his acceptance.

Voice mail answered. As always, Anna didn't give a name—just an address, and a short description. In this case, “Took a bad beating. Maybe seizures?” She hung up. With luck, she'd get a text message in a few minutes saying he was on the way. Or, hell, maybe he didn't come down here just like everybody else, and she'd get nothing at all.

Moreno's breathing seemed steadier than before, and his shivering had abated. He was still slick with sweat and he looked like somebody'd worked him over with a tire iron, but Anna allowed herself to hope. He was healing, not slipping into a coma.

“What the fuck are you doing here, priest?” she asked. His presence, his activity, had been bothering her since
she'd seen the guy, a little, but now the pervasive strangeness of it boiled over. “This your charity work, or what?”

“I'm not a priest,” Abas said. “You should go.”

“You don't belong here.”

“
You
don't belong here. You're not family. You're not blood.”

He'd said the words before—the same words, like a different sort of incantation than the kind he used when conjuring. He threw them at her like they would ward her off, like they were his personal words of protection. It was odd—he was likely the only white guy in five blocks, and he was lecturing her like
he
belonged here.

“And you are?” she prompted, pointing with her chin at Moreno's unconscious form. “This is how you treat your family? Your
blood
?”

Abas looked down at Moreno, and Anna thought she could see his eyes glisten, an incipient tear swelling at his lower eyelid. “‘Take now thy son, thine only son, Isaac, whom thou lovest, and get thee into the land of Moriah.'”

It was either the Bible or Shakespeare, Anna supposed. She'd never had much patience for either. “I can help you,” she said. “This doesn't have to be on your shoulders. Or his.”

“Would you get a glass of water?” Abas asked, still looking at Moreno's face.

She got up. This was some kind of bullshit, but arguing with the man wasn't getting her anywhere. She found a clean glass in the kitchen and filled it with tap water. Her phone buzzed—a text message from a strange number. It read
On my way
. So that was one less thing to worry about.

She went back to the living room and gave Abas the glass. He put it on the table, still without looking at her.

“I'm gonna come back,” Anna said. “When he's up and feeling better. And then we're gonna have a talk about relics and getting you some help, and we're gonna get to the bottom of a few things. If you don't kill him before then.”

That snapped Abas to attention. “If
I
don't kill him before then? I'm not the only one here with things to atone for.”

“What?”

“We were protected here, but somebody broke the ward. Who do you suppose did that?”

Last night seemed like another lifetime, but the memory of defacing the diagram stood out clearly enough. Anna bit back a reply, then turned to leave.

“Don't come back here,” Abas said as she left.

*   *   *

Karyn watched the door. At some point—maybe today, maybe tomorrow, but in any case not long—Nail would walk in. He'd be wearing a black T-shirt and camouflage pants tucked into his boots, and he'd have an expression like a man who'd just eaten a slice of rotten tomato. “Hey,” he'd say. “What's going on?”

It was the only thing she could see right now, and it bothered her. On the one hand, she could now make it happen at will. Stare at the door and think about it, and she could get the whole sequence to start again. She could even see it from different angles if she walked across the room to get a different view of the door. The vision disintegrated halfway through each time, so she never got to see how the conversation ended, but it went on long enough to teach her a few things she hadn't known already. When Nail showed up for real, they could skip a bunch of that. She wondered if he'd be annoyed.

She pulled her attention from that back to the present, or—she reminded herself—at least the version of the present that Amaimon allowed her to see.

Anna wasn't back yet. Karyn looked out the window, not really expecting to see anything, and at least in that she wasn't disappointed. She checked her phone. Nothing. She dialed Anna again and again got no answer. She considered staring at the door again to try to get a quick glimpse of the future that showed Anna coming home, but she'd given that a couple of goes already, and all that ever happened was Nail coming in and starting his damn story again. That had burned a groove in her brain, and she could recite it at this point, so there was no point in
firing it up one more time. It took a hell of a toll, and she already felt like popping half a dozen Advil and crawling back in bed.

The door opened, and Nail walked in. Karyn groaned. “I know the deal,” she told him. “Now come on. Anna's missing.”

He paused, and the whole scene she'd been concentrating on all morning evaporated. “Missing?” he asked.

“I woke up this morning and she was gone,” Karyn said.

“Oh, hell. Anna's missing again. How many times we gonna do this?”

“As many times as it takes,” Karyn said. “If I could keep her out of trouble, I would. Now come on. Let's get a move on.”

“The Gardens?” Nail asked.

“That would be my guess.”

They took Nail's car. Karyn thought now would be a good time to see if her new skill at manipulating her talent was going to be of any actual use, or if it was only good for playing out short, pointless vignettes in places where she was already safe. If only she weren't so exhausted.

It would also have helped, she thought, if her visions were cooperative in general today, but today had evidently been reserved for the very worst kind. Virtually everything she looked at had been transformed into a baffling symbol. In place of buildings were huge, grotesque insects and monsters, and the streets themselves were flowing rivers or streams of molten lead. She didn't know what any of it meant, and she had nothing like the kind of mental energy available to mess around with it.

“I don't know when she took off,” she said. “I crashed pretty hard last night.”

“It'll be fine,” Nail said, though his face said he thought anything but.

The Gardens were quiet, tomblike. They passed the diagram from the photo. It had faded, the sharp black lines reduced to gray. Another block, and three dead cars, full of
bullet holes, had been pulled awkwardly to the side of the road. Condensation from the air conditioner of one still dripped on the pavement. Blood spattered the sidewalk.

“This doesn't look good,” Karyn said. “Sobell's going to be down here before long, if he's not already. We're running out of time.”

“Don't I know it.”

“What the hell is going on here? Why are there no cops?”

“Anna says they take their time coming down here,” Nail said. “I bet it's worse than that, though. My guess is they've written the place off as a self-cleaning oven.”

“A what?”

Nail made a sour face. “Cop term for a hood where the gang members all kill each other. Knew a place like that down in South Central. Couldn't get a cop down there for nothing but to throw some tape up after the shooting stopped. If that.”

“So this is what we've missed robbing rich people in the Hills.”

“If you say so.”

She watched Nail survey the street. “I don't believe it,” he said. A wide, genuine smile lit up his face.

Karyn followed his gaze. Anna was walking down the sidewalk on the opposite side of the street. Slowly, hugging the buildings, and her arms hung loosely at her sides from slumped, tired shoulders, but she looked whole.

“Yo!” Nail shouted.

Anna jerked, startled, and she stumbled and caught herself against the wall. Then she saw them. “Thank God!” she said. “Get me out of here!”

*   *   *

Back at the loft, Karyn, Nail, and Anna sat around the table. If Tommy had been there, Karyn could have pretended this was old times, just another job that had gotten a little out of control, nothing to worry about. The thought triggered a wave of guilt, the way it probably would for the rest of her life, and she tried to ignore it.

“So, what's going on?” Karyn asked.

“I went in looking for the priest,” Anna said. “I thought I'd be able to keep a lower profile alone.”

Anna's jaw moved as she ground her teeth. That murderous look had concentrated on Karyn for a moment before passing, and Karyn wondered if Anna's suspicions and paranoia were her own or a product of the creature she harbored.

Karyn shifted in her chair. “So. Fill me in.”

“I found him at Moreno's place.”

“And?”

“So I tried to listen in and see what he's up to. Some punk whacked me in the head, and I didn't wake up until this morning.”

Uh-huh, Karyn wanted to say. Anna's head was fine—no blood at all, let alone the kind of wound that would lay somebody out for ten hours or more. Was she even going to try to explain the bandage on her hand, or just pretend it wasn't there?

Trust her a little,
Karyn told herself.
Be patient.
“Then what?”

“That's . . . that's when things got kind of weird. I woke up at Moreno's place. The priest was there. Says his name is Abas. Says he ain't no priest, either. Says he doesn't know anything about any relics, but I dunno about that. Then the shooting started, and Moreno came home, and . . .” Anna scratched the side of her face and frowned. Not concocting a lie, Karyn didn't think, but trying to figure out how to express something. “The priest did some magic. I think he used Moreno as a kind of, I dunno, human shield.”

“I don't get it,” Nail said.

“Okay, the whole time Moreno was there in the circle, it was like he was getting beaten by invisible guys with sticks. It was . . .” She held her hands up, fingers spread apart, then gave up. “Pretty awful,” she finished lamely. “Then the shooting stopped, and one of his guys got home, and . . . Look, I didn't see any of this, so don't take this as firsthand, okay?”

“Yeah, yeah,” Nail said.

“The kid said they were outnumbered. Said the other
gang attacked and shot 'em up. Shot one kid in the head, you understand?”

“Sure.”

“Yeah, well,
then
he said that kid, and some others, got up without a scratch and shot the hell out of the other gang.” Anna looked at her fingernails. “I know when it happened. On the inside, I mean. Moreno's got a huge bruise above his eye. His head bounced right off the floor, hard, and I thought it was like somebody had punched him right square in the face, but I guess maybe it was more like a bullet. Blunted, or slowed, or something, but I think I get what happened. I got a whole bag full of shit for the priest when everything started—hair and blood from the gang kids. You know how Genevieve and Tommy always talked about those kinds of connections. I think the priest made some kind of connection between Moreno and his kids, and Moreno took a bunch of the damage on himself. I thought he was gonna die.”